m 



argumentative subject, wh&ther tlie author' was a niathema« 

 tician or not, and without doubt there will be a considerable 

 fund of internal evidence, whence a decision may in general 

 be formed as to the author's habits of abstruse speculation* 

 It is the peculiar glory of the Church of England^ that be- 

 side giving the most able and irrefragable defence of those 

 tenets in which she differs from other Christian societies, she 

 has, in every age since the Reformation, produced hosts of 

 zealous and enlightened men, who have stood forth the 

 champions and protectors of Christianity in general, and suc- 

 cessfully exerted themselves in overturning whatever had even 

 the slightest or most remote tendency to weaken the stabi- 

 lity of the true faith : every Hobbea has had his Cumberland^ 

 every Spinoza his Clarke, and every Tyndal his Conybeare; 

 nor is it only over the malicious cavils and artful sophistry af 

 professed enemies, that the Protestant Church has to exult, 

 the more venial errors of sincere but ill-judging Christians 

 have not been suffered to pass unnoticed or uncorrected. 

 Now almost all those, by whom such inestimable service has 

 been performed, were of the great theological school of the 

 seventeenth century, all of them carefully disciplined in sci-;. 

 entific reasoning, almost all considerable mathematicians,- 

 acute metaphysicians, and carrying their estimation of logic 

 so far, as to use it technically and with the most complete 

 success, in their arguments and refutations. Cumberland 

 appears to have been not only one of the clearest and most 

 forcible, reasoners, but one of the deepest philosophers! of his* 



VOL. Xll. G 



